Apple is on pace to potentially sell more iPads in its first three months than it sold iPhones in the three months after the touch-screen handset made its debut back in 2007, people familiar with the company's running sales totals say.

Since going on sale for pre-order last Friday morning, customers have purchased "hundreds of thousands of the device," those same people told The Wall Street Journal. By comparison, Apple sold roughly 1.2 million iPhones in the three months following its June 29, 2007 launch.

Meanwhile, the newspaper claims that Apple is 'racing' to tie up a broad number of content licensing deals before the iPad officially hits the market in under three weeks. In particular, the company is trying to convince television networks to drop the price of TV shows that users would downloaded directly to the device.

These efforts and others have reportedly seen the Cupertino-based company temporarily reduce its emphasis on working with newspaper, magazines and textbook publishers on new ways to display their digital content.

"But nailing down the content has proven difficult as some potential collaborators weigh the advantages of working with Apple against the potential threats to their current sources of revenue," the Journal said, citing people familiar with the situation.

The report appears to corroborate an independent analysis performed by an online Apple investor community, which estimated that 120,000 iPads were sold on the first day alone, with orders then settling at a pace of roughly 30,000 per day.

The online investor guys are making up the numbers, their methodology is flawed, they are fan boys trying to drive the release of the iPad to success - because we all know the device is an abject failure.

all these early adopters are fanbois who spend too much money for glitzy tech that is just a toy, nobody besides them or the great unwashed masses of clueless consumers who don't worship at the altar of featuredom will buy this.

I'm buying a 16GB 3G iPad for Mother's Day but yet to find a reason to buy one for myself. Still waiting for that "killer app" to appear that makes me say "I've got to have an iPad."

iTunes Remote? If they really do it well? Kick back on the couch, surf, email, and your whole library from your mac is at your fingertips? (to say nothing of the potential of it as a remote for an apple TV!)

The iPad has so many awesome things going for it, if Apple can pull off moderately priced TV, that will just be another huge feature to add to the list.

One quote in here is a little unnerving though. "nailing down the content has proven difficult as some potential collaborators weigh the advantages of working with Apple against the potential threats to their current sources of revenue."

That pretty much sums up what has kept the Apple TV from greatness. Hopefully Apple can strike a deal with content providers. Once it's on the iPad, then it's just a matter of time until they sign deals for Apple TV content. This will be huge.

From the demo during the special event, the website and other news one can get a pretty good idea. Depending on your needs that may not be enough information, but for the one I'm buying, a mother's day gift, it's more than enough data to know this is a good fit for an occasional computer user who would like something simple when they are away from their iMac for several days at a time.

Dick Applebaum on whether the iPad is a personal computer: "BTW, I am posting this from my iPad pc while sitting on the throne... personal enough for you?"

This is an entirely new category midway between a computer and a smart phone. It's not intended to replace your computer. In fact, the iPad is designed to sync with your computer via iTunes on either your Mac or Windows computer.

Apple's betting that they can successfully establish a new category that won't cannibalize sales of their computer or iPhone product line. They don't want it to have all those ports, DVD player, etc.

This is a replacement for stand-alone devices like eBook readers, portable DVD players, portable voice recorders, digital photo frames, etc. It will be better than any laptop in certain situations like watching a movie on an airplane in the coach seats or making a one-on-one sales presentation over lunch at a restaurant.

The Windoze crowd will pan it until Microsoft copies it and put's their name on it. Then they'll want one. That's the way it works with that crowd.

What's that old saying- "There's a sucker born every minute."
Steve Jobs is the PT Barnum of the 21st century.

iPad hasn't even been tested yet - what fools.

Those of us with first hand experience dealing with Apple products know the risk is very low. This fool preordered a WiFi + 3G. I'll try it out for a while before deciding whether to buy a second one. ;-)

The online investor guys are making up the numbers, their methodology is flawed, they are fan boys trying to drive the release of the iPad to success - because we all know the device is an abject failure.

Agreed, the people who provide these numbers are experts at "lying" with statistics. Take the figure "hundreds of thousands" that have been pre-ordered. That could mean as few as 200,000 iPads. If you believe the first-day sales of 120,000, then as few as 80K might have been sold over the next 5-6 days -- maybe as few as 13K per day. If sales stabilize at that level, more than 1.2 million iPads will be sold in the first 3 months. More precisely about 1.6 million.

Quote:

The iPad suxxors majorly, it doesn't have:
[...]
a cell chip to make phone calls
GPS

At least Skype-like apps will be available and the iPad 3G does have GPS, but probably not the magnetometer found in the iPhone 3GS.

Yea I'm with you... "Apple is on pace to potentially sell more iPads in its first three months than it sold iPhones in the three months after the touch-screen handset made its debut back in 2007," yea sure but look at the iPhone now...

Oh wait...

Nothing but good wishes from this soon to be buyer of 2 iPads (gonna wait till the dust settles so to speak). Yea I clearly have a somewhat negative view on how Apple controls the App Store but differences aside I'm rooting for them on this one too.

Apple needs to remind the TV and movie content owners that it has never hurt anyones business... Sure the music companies are pissed about the dominance Apple has over their industry but I think they need a gentle reminder as to what condition THIER industry would be in WITHOUT Apple stepping in. They were collectively locked in a death spiral long before the iTunes Store and Apple all but saved them from themselves.

The Movie and TV industry isn't as bad off (yet) and perhaps this is the reason they don't feel they need to embrace Apples vision... but the reality is BluRay sales aren't even close to what the DVD sales were and their prices aren't the ONLY thing to blame. DVDs when they came out could be purchased day in and day out for $9 - $14 bucks each... Yes that's including the generous $5 OFF and $10 OFF coupons that digitally littered the net (back in the early days) and people got 'hooked' on building their libraries... Now the coupons are non-existant and the 20% off sales are only made available AFTER the online stores mark UP their prices by 10-15% (on average).

TV Shows... they again could be had for $30-$40 per season (sometime less) for just about everything except the shows that had over zealous fans like StarTrek (guilty) and they got upwards of $89 per season (believe it or not). Now the studios are trying to re-release TV shows on bluray and are dumbstruck as to WHY the people aren't rushing to REBUY them (at inflated prices usually).

Well this my take on things anyway... but reason why I personally think the studios aren't providing the depth of content is due to the fact that they are stalling to see if BluRay FINALLY comes around and performs like DVD sales did.

Sorry but I for one don't see it happening... and I'm speaking from a certain level of confidence. My DVD movie collection has gotta be close to 600 titles and my TV episodes, I don't even think I can count em but they take up 4 or 5 full shelves on a large wall in my family room. BluRay... I've purchased 10 movies total. I just can't bring myself to rebuy the majority of the DVDs since they mostly go unwatched to begin with some haven't even been opened I don't think. I'm sure many others are in a similar position as me.... Staring at a wall of DVDs and saying... no... not again.

HP introduced their Slate before Apple. Which is far more powerful then the iPad.

And ModBook was released well before the HP Slate and is much powerful. That doesn't make it more ideal or a better choice than slower tablets.

Plus, there were a lot of tablets being announced at CES trying to get the announcement jump on the inevitable Apple tablet demo. Are any of the tablets from CES going on sale before the iPad. It seems they were less finalized than the iPad, had unknown specs and most had no price points, likely waiting to see what Apple had to offer before committing to anything.

Dick Applebaum on whether the iPad is a personal computer: "BTW, I am posting this from my iPad pc while sitting on the throne... personal enough for you?"

HP introduced their Slate before Apple. Which is far more powerful then the iPad.

I'm sorry, I made that point upthread sir, but thanks for playing! To ensure you are being at least semi-original in your comment please refer to the checklist at comment #4. Those are already claimed.

iTunes Remote? If they really do it well? Kick back on the couch, surf, email, and your whole library from your mac is at your fingertips? (to say nothing of the potential of it as a remote for an apple TV!)

This is what I'm waiting for proof of. C'mon steve.

I agree with the remote, but it sure would be nice if they simply included IR in the unit to begin with. It would make a stellar all-in-one component stereo / TV / home automation controller. Let's hope Apple makes their own app that fulfills all of these fancy-shmancy needs.

HP introduced their Slate before Apple. Which is far more powerful then the iPad.

would have to be more powerful..its running windows 7....hell it probably needs an 8 core processor just to do mundane tasks.

shows you how efficiently apple can write software. The idea is to make them portable with 10 hours of usage. Lets see the HP slate even try to come close to that. especially with windows 7..and wasnt the slate supposed to be already released? or did that get delayed? where are the places you can pre-order one?

Between my 13" MBP and iPhone 3GS, both of which will likely be updated to new models when they appear, the window for me to see a real need for an iPad is very small.

So far, I think a great eReader for textbooks will have to be made and I'm not sure an app using ePub will do it since I'm looking for something that can replace actual textbooks not just mimic the content. I don't think the technology is here yet for what I want/need.

PS: The only other option is to get rid of the iPhone altogether and replace it with a 3G iPad since I don't use my phone as a phone much at all, I have Google Voice, and I am almost always with a book in my hand anyway. I'll have to see how this would work since it won't be pocketable for iPod use and what Apple comes up with new Mac notebooks, IPhone HW and iPhone OS updates

Dick Applebaum on whether the iPad is a personal computer: "BTW, I am posting this from my iPad pc while sitting on the throne... personal enough for you?"